Professional PHP Workflow in Sublime Text 3

This series is exclusively for the working developer who, though familiar with Sublime Text, needs to tweak and optimize their editor particularly for PHP development. Come along, as we review everything from error detection, to project management, to automatic PSR-2 fixing.

If you're manually opening the sidebar and right-clicking to create a new file, there's an easier way: pull in the AdvancedNewFile package, and save countless hours each day (or about 45 seconds, but still...).

I'm sure you're familiar with the process of creating basic snippets, but don't skimp on these. Seek out repeated keystrokes like a hawk. Can you instead translate that repetition into a reusable snippet? In this episode, we'll review just a few simple, yet enormously useful, expansions. In the process, we'll also pull in the SnippetMaker package to make the act of extracting snippets much less painful.

Out of the box, Sublime Text provides no error detection whatsoever. Forget a semicolon or brace? Sorry, you're on your own. Certainly, we can't have that, so let's pull in the Sublime Linter package to provide instant feedback each time we save a file.

It's great that we can now detect PSR-2 inconsistencies in our projects, but wouldn't it be nice if those issues could be automatically fixed without requiring an ounce of effort on our parts? And what if we could extend things further to provide extra optimizations? For example, can we automatically remove unused class imports each time we save a file? Well of course we can, thanks to php-cs-fixer.

If you maintain multiple codebases or open-source projects, you may find that manually switching between them can prove cumbersome. Instead, let's leverage Sublime's project functionality to ease the burden. We can even pull in the ProjectManager package to simplify things further.

If you work on multiple computers, such as a laptop and main workstation, you'll likely want to sync your Sublime Text settings between the two. We can accomplish this quite easily by leveraging Dropbox and symlinks. Let's review the full process in this episode.

It's important to find a good workflow for rapidly testing your code. While it's not too much trouble to manually switch to the command line each time, we can improve things greatly by leveraging the Sublime-PHPUnit package.